Winter Flames
by Akihikari
Summary: It's the middle of winter and neither Karkat nor Kankri wants to get out of bed.


_Winter Flames_

oOo

The first thing you are aware of is your breath, chilled by the dawn as it twirls against your face. And _his_ face is still close to yours when you open your eyes. Once they've adjusted, the half-light tells you he's asleep, but not how well he's sleeping.

You find yourself wishing it were a little brighter.

The curtains are drawn over the single wide window across the room; a sliver of light gleams quietly from the crack between the drapes, fizzling into gloomy nothingness just a few feet beyond. You're too warm to move.

_Too warm and too naked,_ you amend a second later, and memories of the previous night render you even warmer as the blood rushes to your face. _Where are my pants?_

There's no point getting out of bed to search for them; it's cold and he's a light sleeper—light enough to be awoken by the creak of a bedspring. This you know from personal experience, but you also know that you'd rather lie beside him for days than be the first thing he sees when he wakes. Not this morning.

Why are you even awake in the morning?

_What time was it when we passed out? Three? Four?_

You can't have slept for more than an hour or two. _Let him rest a bit longer,_ you think resignedly, eyes returning to his motionless figure. Even the rise and fall of his chest is hard to make out when he's curled up on his side. You remember how chilly your own breath felt to you on waking, think of how wildly relieved you were to find him beside you, and a wave of such heady affection courses through you that it's all you can do not to snuggle closer.

_Sleep tight, you fuck._

_Though come right down to it, I guess _I'm_ the fuck._ You can't help it—you let out a low laugh. You're going to be shaking off intrusive thoughts of last night for a long time.

The response is immediate. "Karkat?"

It's too late to slam your eyes shut, but it'll take a while for him to see anything... You stay silent and as still as you can possibly be with your heart racing a mile a minute, hoping against hope that he's still well under, he was just talking in his sleep and now he's drifted off again and you have nothing to worry about for at least another hour. _Two hours. Three. Let him sleep the day away if he can._

But even through the pounding in your ears, you can sense the change in his breathing. His face is too close for wishful thinking. Too close for comfort. You wish it was closer.

"Go to sleep", you whisper back, your throat painfully tight. Part of it is the fact that both of you decided to sleep butt-naked in midwinter—blankets or no, it's freezing and you really should have known better, but you had neither the ability nor the inclination to think about that sort of thing back there, of course. And of course, part of it is just you.

He's never _that_ loud.

"It's just past dawn, you have plenty of time. Go back to sleep." You turn away in a great rustle of blankets that seems deafening in the stillness of the morning. "I'm gonna try sleeping a bit longer myself, so—"

"I've been awake for at least half an hour", he murmurs, and he sounds like it too. His voice carries no trace of sleep whatsoever. "Didn't want to get up. Frankly, you don't sound all that drowsy yourself."

It's so much easier to get all soft-eyed over him when he's asleep. "Yeah, well. You know I'm not much for anything longer than a nap. Actually, I—" _I'll freeze my globes off if I get out now, what am I saying?_ "I guess I'll just freshen up now, you know? No point lazing the fuck around if I'm done sleeping—"

"Karkat..."

His arms take you by surprise, the quick kiss he drops on your neck even more so. "Don't move yet", he says quietly into your bare back. "It's warm here and I don't want you to go. Let's... let's just stay like this forever."

"Forever?" you snort.

"Or until one of us gets hungry, whichever comes first", he mumbles. In that cold room, his breath on your skin feels fever-hot, the live warmth of his body finding its way into your very bloodstream and infusing it with red fire. He chuckles, and you can feel it everywhere from your kneecaps to your fingernails to the pit of your stomach.

It's still too dark to see clearly and your back is turned to him, but you fight down your stupid, much-too-content smile nonetheless; he might hear it in your voice. When you give him a noncommittal grunt, you can swear he does anyway.

_Who cares about my voice when he can feel my heart beating?_

"Are you feeling alright?" he asks presently. It comes out as a sigh against the nape of your neck and warm as you are, you have to suppress a not entirely unpleasant shiver. As for his question, well... you're too comfortable to snap at him, too aware of what you've done to work up any real mortification. But it's still convenient to dismiss the new heat on your face as such.

"I'm fine. I wasn't hatched yesterday."

"Indeed you weren't", he says idly, and you are suddenly very conscious of how far down his hands are. "My apologies. Are you cold right now?"

You are many things right now, including a little too sensitive all over—and with good reason—but cold is not one of them. "No way in hell." A hair's breadth of a pause. "Do we have to talk now? My throat's too—" _too sore to speak,_ you were going to say, but something pulls the words back into your mouth, like a fishhook on a short line. _Why does _that_ embarrass me? Why that of all things?_

"Ah, I'm sorry about that." You know he isn't. Honestly, neither are you.

You remain in silence for some time after, trying not to think of the way his touch seems to tingle on your skin without moving so much as a muscle, trying very hard not to think about the searing heat of his body pressed along the length of yours. Trying not to feel your heartbeat picking up speed with every breath you take in, every breath he lets out. Trying to relax as much as you can, to give the impression that you're exhausted and sleepy and completely spent—no one could blame you after all, not in the wake of recent events, but—

A hand finds yours under the heavy gray blanket and closes over it, the fingers settling between yours with a familiar ease that you will never find so completely in anyone else. Two sweeps still separate your bodies, and possibly two million lie between your minds, but you know your hands already resemble his as much as your face, right down to the messy tousle of your hair.

You will never know anything or anyone as fully as you know him. This certainty is as achingly sweet as it is frightening.

"I'm not hungry yet", you say at last, and then you raise your entwined hands and press his knuckles to your lips. Who cares? It's chilly outside and he's just so warm. He's also incredibly winsome when taken by surprise.

His arms tighten around you. "I kind of am."

"Really?" There's no keeping the disappointment out of your voice. "Wanna get something to eat, then?" _It's cold and I don't know where my pants are,_ you want to add, but manage to hold your tongue. There's a brief lull before he speaks and a shuffle of some sort behind you, followed by another kiss, on your earlobe this time.

"I didn't say it was food I needed."

It's more his choice of words than anything else that causes you to groan. "Of all the ways you could have put it, why the royal wet ass-eating—"

"Admittedly, I was somewhat disarmed at the moment", he murmurs, giving your hand a brief squeeze. And just like that, he has the advantage again. You give him an aggrieved sigh because you will not allow yourself to smile.

_Kankri._

"Won't you turn this way, Karkat?"

Your hesitation is perfunctory, though it's light enough to see his face now and you're not quite sure if you want to just yet. The uncertainty only increases when you see the sparkle in his half-lidded eyes. Even his eyelashes look familiar.

If you thought you'd come to terms with last night before this...

_It's not like it was the first time,_ you tell yourself, but that somehow makes it worse. There's something about the reality, the nearness of him on this wintry grey morning that's almost painful to think of. And it's that very hint of not-pain that keeps you thinking, keeps your gaze steady on his face until finally, he closes his eyes and breaks into a grin that's more sheepish than mischievous.

The hand not tight in yours trails a leisurely path up to your face—casually setting off a hundred dancing flames beneath your skin—and there it rests, pulse against pulse, until you mutter some drivel about having the worst evening breath. But your eyes are fluttering shut already. _It's just been a few hours. I can take evening breath. I can take anything right now. I can take the fucking end of the world._

His lips brush your forehead, then your nose, then your chin. _That's all. _Slowly, gently, they trace every curve of your face until you can feel nothing _but_ him. _That's all. W_ith your vision shuttered into blackness, every touch becomes the universe, every kiss a newborn star...His arms are the rushes of a blazing fire; his breaths, smoke.

Against the shell of your reddening ear, he whispers your name like a prayer.

_That's all._

_It's just my hand he's holding. It's just my name he's saying._

_Why is my heart beating so fast?_

Just before you can throw what's left of your dignity to the winds and complain, those lips find yours at last. Your free arm has already snaked its way around his back, fingers disappearing into his hair; these are parts you have rehearsed to perfection: slow and rapid, measured and impulsive, your movements complement each other in unbroken tandem.

You are as different as you are alike, and it is this knowledge that burns in the space where your bodies meet.

He may let his hands rove over every inch of your skin, his tongue not far behind, but it is you who slings an impatient leg over his waist. And while he sighs into the hollow of your neck, you have other places to seek—places that are still tender from last night, places that you have marked and mapped and staked your claim over countless times. You know that all you have to do is lift the edge of the blanket and every single one of these spots will be yours to see, purpling in the aftermath of your relentless attentions, loud and proud against the pale grey of his skin like ink on canvas.

But if Kankri's hiss of approval is any indication, you know your way even with your eyes closed. The shiver that runs up the inside of his thigh is impossible to miss; or is it just you, you whose well-scarred body mirrors his down to the last bite mark? You who can read the language of his limbs just as well as your own?

Fingertips begin to dip southward with new deliberation and when they finally touch you where the throbbing is most insistent, you can only gasp.

It's hot, even in this icy room with the curtains shutting out most of the daylight it's hot, his lips and the fervid warmth between his legs setting you alight under that enormous blanket, pulling sweat into the crook of your elbows and the bend of your knees. You don't plan to fall open so easily when he rolls you onto your back, not even when he climbs on top, but it's pointless. Your legs part almost before he's even laid a hand on them.

There's a whoosh and the black beyond your eyelids seems to grow more solid; you open your eyes to total darkness. "It's just the blanket", comes his voice, muffled against your stomach and ticklish enough to make you squirm. "Thought we'd be better off like this."

You'd agree if you had any words left to agree with. All you can muster up is a faint hum of satisfaction when you're pulled into a kiss again; further down, his fingers are trailing aimless patterns around the base of your bulge, occasionally dipping below as if to remind you of how wet you are. You need no reminding. With his rhythm still so slow and your heartbeat pooling at your groin, there is little else you can think of.

Not even though you know this routine by heart. It's your place to flail, his to watch you with a calm that nobody should be capable of at a time like this—watch you glare, watch you moan, watch you come completely undone just by the touch of a hand that might as well be your own. You may teeter on the edge for as long as he pleases and he will still go slow.

Bent almost in half, your legs slung over his shoulders, your voice half a wheeze now from your recent exertions, you can twitch and thrash until you're in tears; but begging, relenting—those things are alien to you both. Your parts are too smoothly in sync, and the entire point of being in sync with him is knowing that up till a certain point, he will always go slow.

But as always, he crosses that point eventually. It's right around the time when he first slides one finger into you and then two, when—if you have coherence left in your thoughts around the pleasure that's blossoming through every nerve in your body, every synapse—you can see the calm begin to crack like a thaw, see it in a way that filters more through the pores in your skin than your unfocused eyes. You don't need even that to know; you never do. By the time he repositions himself, the trembling is unmistakeable.

And once he's fully inside you, your breaths in total resonance for one rocky moment, it's his turn.

Sometimes you wish you could see this clearly, see him curl into you with each thrust, _see_ him bite into your shoulder or the skin of your throat like he's the one being fucked hard enough to break in two. See his nails break your skin and his teeth tear at his swollen blood-red lips; see him struggle with just as much urgency, just as little pride as you did not so long ago; see him half unraveled from the start by the simple and not so simple act of joining your bodies like you so need to. But you have never missed any of this even without the luxury of being able to keep your eyes open. He mewls and gasps in the darkness until the world is nothing but him... Kankri and the warm, pulsing reality of his body and mind melting into yours.

Kankri and the desperation with which he clutches at you now, the ease with which you hold him while he shudders.

And it's only when both of you are equally undone, equally delirious with need— differences and similarities forgotten in the burning synchronization of your heartbeats where he ends and you begin—that he can no longer go slow. Because when all you can feel is the heat, your rhythm finally gives way, and this you know by heart too. Surrounded by him, surrounding him, it is all you need to know.

Only Kankri, Kankri and the knowledge that knowing no longer matters now.

What difference does it make to know when nothing can ever prepare you for this?

There is no bracing yourself for the last oncoming rush of sensation. Your eyes may be shut tight, your tongue approaching numbness in your open mouth, but you reach for him with a final quivering cry that returns to you like an echo and you know he's every bit as close as you are and it's enough, it's more than enough, it's everything. With one great spasm, your body tightens up all at once just as a fresh heat flowers deep within; his arms give way not a moment sooner or later and he slumps atop you, panting helplessly, the tremble in his bones a perfect mirror of yours.

After your breathing has slowed, you reach down among the tangle of your limbs with a shaky hand and grasp one of his. Everything else will come later, you think, when the rest of your mind has begun to piece itself together, to detach from his until next time; for now you are content to lie like this, legs still splayed on either side of him and heart still racing. You can feel his heart too, and it's in step with yours, like you knew it would be.

_Knowing is only half of it. Knowing is everything._ And so are you, and so is he.

But surprises aren't half bad sometimes. "Don't move", you mumble when he stirs as though to get off you. "It's warm here. Let's... let's just stay like this..."

"Forever?" he finishes with the merest suggestion of a laugh.

_No... we're not completely alike. _Which is what makes the pleasure of knowing him all the more delightful.

"If you'd like that", you whisper, pulling him closer.


End file.
